"Project Hail Mary": a delightful sci-fi novel
The story starts with our protagonist waking up on a bed inside a room with two dessicated corpses. He has no memory of who he is is, or why he's here. Or even what "here" is.
Soon he discovers that a pair of (pretty dumb) robotic arms have kept him alive through feeding tubes, catheters and constant muscle stimulation which has left him not just perfectly healthy but positively ripped.
After a few failed attempts, he manages to open a hatch taking him to a control room of sorts. And that's when he discovers that he's in a spaceship that hurtling down towards the sun at insane speeds.
Except that it's not exactly the Sun, and no technology exists that could allow him to be where he is.
As his memory returns piecemeal, an extraordinary situation bares itself in front of him - an existential threat that has forced humanity to put its fate in the hands of a high-school teacher - to accomplish a task that the mission-planners couldn't even guess.
As is characteristic of the author (who also wrote "The Martian"), the plot is loaded with beautifully crafted and entirely plausible situations that the main character finds himself in. And just like "The Martian", the solutions are rooted in basic science and human ingenuity. No handwavy space-magic is summoned to resolve difficult situations.
But you don't read sci-fi for a crash-course on hard science. You read sci-fi for expanding your imagination and to leave you in awe of the extraordinary possibilities the universe presents.
And that's where this novel excels above "The Martian". The "big ideas" on evolution, astrobiology and physics are mind-bending but entirely accessible. After 12 hours of office work, I'd often not have energy to follow all the hard science, but it were these big ideas that kept me hooked.
It's not a spoiler as it's literally on the back cover, but there are aliens. Weird, non-human and delightfully morbid aliens. I thought the author took a little too much delight in explaining how they poop, but at no point, the explanations became stale or forced.
The dialogues are natural and by the end of the book, the seemingly implausible premise starts not just to appear plausible, but actually inevitable.
Like a good reviewer, I should point out the shortcomings now, but naah.. I'll leave that for the professionals. I'm simply here to get you hooked.